Friday, January 15, 2010

Today folks, you will get to witness the overzealous ramblings of my daydreaming mind! This example of my daydreaming-ness is actually quite mild compared to many of my mental shenanigans.

Background: Anyone who has read my blog before probably knows that I'm doing my best to get a job as an art teacher. Unfortunately, since I don't have an education degree or teacher certification, I have to either worm my way into an alternative certification program or go back to school to get my MAT (Master of Arts in Teaching). Ideally, I would prefer to go back to school so that I could actually learn HOW to teach and handle a classroom. If I do the alternative certification (PACE), I'd just be tossed into a classroom with little to no preparation and I'd have to wing it for 3 years, after which I'd get my permanent certification. Assuming I fulfilled all the requirements and passed all my evaluations, that is. It is assumed that if I can do that then I am fully capable of teaching and they'll let me have my certification despite my lack of educator training.

I've been working toward doing alternative certification since March 2009. At the time I had a job and didn't see how it would be feasible for me to quit to get my Masters. I couldn't work and go to school at the same time because I couldn't be in two places at once. It was hard enough to figure out how to pay for the schooling if I KEPT my job, and quitting my job to go back to school would only make it that much harder to pay for it. There was lots of dreaming about winning the lottery. If I could just win enough to cover tuition, books, and fees, and all that other stuff they charge you for, plus cover 2 years of lost wages so that I could still pay my bills while I was in school and not working...

That mushroomed into imagining winning enough in the lottery so I could pay tuition, cover lost wages, and pay off our mortgage, car payments, previous student loans, make upgrades and repairs to the house, and so on. And of course I'm listing and picturing in my mind specific things I want to do for the house (including some major landscaping with someone to help come up with a design and other people to do all the work). At that point I decided that if I'm going to win the lottery, I may as well imagine winning the Big Kahuna - the Powerball Jackpot! Which would of course be at least $300 million at the time, I'd be the only winner so I wouldn't have to share it with another winner, and I'd be able to do all the things I'd listed before AND help out all my family, friends, and favorite charities! Then I realized that since I had all these millions I wouldn't even HAVE to work anymore, so I would go back to school just to take classes for fun. Oh, and I'd move to Hawaii of course. Duh. :)

haha! These are the kinds of fantasies I have too. Like I'll take a walk around the neighborhood and start building my house wish list. "A bigger window for the front just like that one. A little porch too." By the time I'm done, I realize that I should have just saved the $ and bought a different house with all those features!